The Heart Collectors

Collection Call

                Some people are just born to have bad things happen to them. And then sometimes bad things just happen to good people. That's a fact of life. But sometimes, you get things that are just so completely fucked up that you can't find any way to describe them but to write it all out. And that's what I'm doing now. My name is Alan Faubus, and I am...or at least I was a patrolman for the Little Rock Police Department. I've never been one for writing; I hated English class in high school. Actually, to put it more accurately, I failed English class in high school. Never did understand any of that crap. But now, I suppose I must have actually paid some attention, considering I am writing this down now as we speak.
         All through high school, I had a very clear sense of what was real and what was clearly impossible. All that changed the night of June 7, 2001, about four months before that nasty World Trade Center business. It was a typical Arkansan summer night: muggy and hot as hell. The air was so moist it seemed that surely if you swiped a cup through the space in front of you, you'd have a glass of clear, albeit hot, drinking water. With our uniforms, it was an exercise in Hell on Earth for us troopers. I was working the graveyard patrol that night, the one that goes around and pisses off teenagers by telling them to go on home. Not that they listen to me of course, never mind that I'm only a couple years older than them, or at least I was at the time. Now it feels I must be at least fifty.
         My partner, Jim Durant, and I were cruising down Markham street when the call came in from dispatch. Suspected murder on South University Avenue, in the University in point of fact. Durant looked at me; we were about the same age then, and it was that look colleagues give each other when they know they're about to get into something big. I'm sure the look on my own face was the same.
         We'd never been on a homicide case before, but what the hell, we made it through the academy just like every other guy, and unlike the rest of the Force, Durant and I hadn't spent as many long nights in the Krispy Kreme donut shop. We were right up the road, so it took us about five minutes, maybe six, to get to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock dorm rooms. A couple of the students were standing outside with the typical shocked looks of people who have seen far more than they need to. Durant and I pulled up, turned on the neat flashing blue lights troopers love to use so much, and got out.
         One of the students, an older guy, he was perhaps a year older than me at twenty-three, stepped up. He was wearing a maroon Texas A&M t-shirt and a pair of striped boxers, but somehow he managed to look calm and professional. "It happened up on the third floor officer. I don't know what happened, but I heard screaming from down the hall, away from the elevator. I gathered up my roommate and the rest of the floor, but...." At this point it's too much for him. Durant, who has been studiously copying down everything onto the little yellow notepad with a black ink pen,  looks up as the man begins to break down into hysteric sobs. We exchange another of those glances, but this one seems to be more along the lines of saying "we're really in deep shit now partner."
         "Calm down sir," I'm surprised to find my voice so calm. As I look back, it disgusts me that I could be so calm, but how could I know what these kids had been through? Well, I was about to find out, and I don't blame them a bit. "Keep everyone outside, and well away from the building."
         He nodded, and began to regain his composure, what little was left of it anyway. His classmates gathered round, and Durant and I stepped back to the car. This time I grabbed the radio and called dispatch. "Dispatch, this is unit 234, at the UALR dorm rooms. We're gonna need some backup, over."
         Dispatch's reply is nearly instant, a woman whose voice I don't recognize but who is clearly pissed off at this late hour, "Negative 234, you guys are the only ones in that sector tonight."
         "Then get someone from another sector out here dammit! These folks are nearly crazy with hysterics, and I'm not dragging my ass into a firefight without some God-damned backup!"
         Static, then: "Roger 234, we've got units 752 and 091 en route. They should be there in thirty. Until then, check out what you can."
         I sigh and set the radio down. Durant and I exchange yet one more look before drawing our pistols in our right hands, flashlights in the left, crisscrossing so the beam of the light points wherever the muzzle of the pistol does. I stand back and cover Durant as he pulls open the door to the building, and then we're inside. The power must have been cut, because the lights are all out, our flashlights cutting wide white swaths through the darkness of the lobby.
         "If the power's out, so are the ‘vators." Durant commented. I nodded, and pointed  towards the stairs with my light. He went ahead, crouching, and we both kept our lights on a constant swivel. Just because the incident had happened up on the third floor didn't mean it would stay there.
         We were nearly to the third floor when the smell hit us. The sickly sweet smell of garbage that's been out in the sun too long, mixed strangely with the smell of white beach sand. Durant gagged, I cussed. From beneath the door, we could see the dim, yellow-orange glow of emergency lights. We opened the door, and stepped through into Hell.
         Blood was everywhere. On the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. Some of it was just smears, but others looked eerily like hands that had clawed at any surface to get away from whatever held them. Some of it spelled out messages that made no sense. "Beware the Lurk," "The Heart Collector comes," "Evolution 169," and "Staples!" are just some examples. Some didn't even look like English, but rather some garbled script that was never meant for a human tongue. The stuff in English was the scribbling of madmen, hastily written, sometimes trailing off down the wall as the victim breathed his or her last or was dragged away. Those in the strange script were spelled out in neat, precise lines and angles, the lack of curves giving it an alien look.
         "I think we know what happened to the rest of the students," Durant muttered, shining his beam on the floor. "Hey check it out!" His flashlight illuminated a path which was not quite clear of blood, but was certainly cleaner than the rest of the dark corridor, but it was more than that. It looked smudged, as if something had been dragged down it multiple times. We couldn't exchange glances in the dim half-light, but we were both thinking the same thing: "Jesus Christ, what in the fuck is going on here?"
         We should have waited for the back up at that point. Six cops with guns is much better than two. Maybe it was the adrenaline rushing through our veins, or maybe just the raw hatred for whomever, or whatever, had done this disgusting act. Whatever it was, we didn't wait for backup. We followed that smudged-out trail of blood for about half the length of the hall, where it turned into one of the dorm rooms. The door was only half-way on its hinges, and had been hit with some sort of sharp instrument so many times that even that was a futile attempt to keep whatever had done this out. Durant and I braced ourselves and nudged it open.
         Durant immediately turned to a corner and threw up. I was not far behind myself. There was a female body, completely naked, attached to the wall via several industrial-grade staples in her wrists and ankles. These had clearly gone in before the smaller ones, the blood around them had dried to a crispy black crust, while the others were slowly coagulating. Smaller staples created miniature horrors all about her body. Her eyelids had been stapled open, though why I couldn't say, as there was another staple in each eyeball, causing the soft globes to explode, and even now they leaked lazily down her bloody cheeks, leaving only black sockets that seemed to stare deep into our souls.
         I should add here, to whoever reads this, that I have just soiled my drawers as a result of these memories. Nothing pertaining to the story at hand, but perhaps you'll grasp the horror a bit more.
         Moving back to the subject at hand, her ears had been stapled in the middle, much like the procedure some obese citizens decided was necessary to cut off the nerve that made them hungry. Somehow, I didn't think this girl would ever worry about that. Her neck held yet another industrial-grade staple, this one was clearly the newest wound, but curiously it was no longer bleeding. On her shoulders, the thing that had done this had written something in the same, precise script out in the hall. Seeing it on concrete in blood was bad enough. Seeing it on human flesh brought a hot spray of piss to my newly pressed uniform.
         When I finally stopped tracing those alien, angular lines, I saw what shocked me the most at this point. Her left breast was gone. And I don't mean gone as in she was flat-chested, for to say that would have been a crime, given the fullness of the right. No, where there should have been a soft mound of flesh, there was only a gaping, ragged hole. This too, was rimmed in blood, but strangely, no blood was flowing. It didn't take me long to see why. Her heart was gone. Gone, just as the breast that had protected it was gone.
         Moving on, her thighs were covered in the same strange script, but it was the atrocity between her legs that appalled me. Durant let out a guffaw of laughter, painfully loud in this slaughterhouse. "I've heard of ‘locking the barn,' but this seems a tad bit extreme." Indeed it did. I won't bother you any more with the details. Suffice to say that it shook Durant and I so badly, that Durant was actually able to laugh. That should be enough.
         As we were turning to continue our search for whatever was left to see, it came to me that that sandy rot smell was stronger here. I don't know what compelled me to do it. I raised my pistol and put one round into the exact center of her forehead. Where there should have been a spray of blood, heart or no heart, was instead a cascade of sand. Not the white beach sand of paradise, but the black sand you hear those old Iwo Jima vets bitch about for hours on end. Shuddering, I turned away.
         Durant and I searched the other rooms, all with similar horrors, all in different and ingenious methods. All with their hearts removed, and black sand where there should have been red blood. We searched the next two floors up as well. Every floor looked nearly the same, with one oddity. On the third floor, the writing on the walls had been mostly in English. By the time we got to the fifth, the vast majority was in that evil, horrible script.
         The sixth floor happened to be home to the Administration Offices, including the Dean of Residential Affairs. Ironically, his office turned out to be room number 666. Not so ironically, and in fact, perhaps, predictably, that's where the shit finally hit the fan. There was no wanton slaughter in the hallway here, but that script covered every surface, making it all the more horrifying. The doors here were all intact, all closed, and all locked. Except for 666. Where everywhere else had been lit by the yellow-orange dimness of emergency lights, there was a pulsing red from beneath the door. The pulse had no set rhythm or tempo. One moment it seemed to be beating in time with my own thumping heart, the next it would be ebbing as slowly as the drip of blood from the walls.
         Durant and I looked at each other again, both thinking that we should go back but knowing that we wouldn't. I covered him as he opened the door. We had only thought the third floor was Hell. Where this room had once been an office, it had been converted into some weird sort of shrine. The desk and chair and other typical office amenities were nowhere to be seen, and the walls seemed literally coated with blood that seemed to flow down to the floor with never a blank patch of paint to show for the movement. The floor crunched under my feet, and I didn't need to look to know that it was covered in black sand. Blood sand. At the back of the room stood a massive stone plinth, with a sort of table in front of it. On top of this table sat a massive aquarium filled with a disgusting purple-black liquid with dark shapes floating in it. We had found the missing hearts.
         We had advanced into the room as we looked, and now we stood at the direct center. That was our first mistake. It also happened to be Durant's last. With a cry he disappeared up to the ceiling. Hot blood rained down on me, and his cries seemed to grow further away. That shouldn't have been possible; the ceiling was only maybe a few feet above my head. Except that it wasn't. Somehow, we were no longer in the office of the Dean of Residential Affairs. We were in hell now, and this was for real. My flashlight beam didn't penetrate the darkness above me, and as I stepped backwards I slipped and fell towards the door. Looking down, I nearly laughed. Sitting wedged between my heel and the floor was a beautiful specimen of a female breast. At least, it would have been beautiful had it still been attached to a living, breathing female.
         Durant's torso came crashing down inches to my left, followed shortly thereafter by various other bits and pieces of my former partner. He had not been gifted the death of the victims in the dorm rooms. He had simply been torn apart and mutilated. Up until now I had barely breathed, certainly hadn't issued a sound from my vocal cords. Now I screamed. I screamed like a little bitch and I'm not afraid to admit it. I screamed, because what had killed Durant was crawling down the opposite wall.
         "Monstrosity" is the only word I can think of to describe this creature. A smooth metal mask covered its face, framed by a black hood, but with two red slits of what I presumed to be eyes peering out at me. It's body was twisted and broken, and it moved with the fluid grace of someone with no bones in their body. And as it flashed its hands forward to gut me, the scalpel-like claws responsible for that disgustingly precise script glinted in the dim light. It was the last straw.
         I raised my pistol and fired wildly. Shots ricocheted off of the mask, but others punched into its body, and one lucky shot managed to get right into its left eye. That was my second mistake. The thing fell back howling, giving me enough time to get up and out of the door. I sprinted for the stairs. I looked back. That was my last mistake of that night. The creature had removed its mask, showing me a face I'm not even sure a mother could love, if this thing had ever had something so luxurious as a mother. It was a pig's face, as broken and cruel as the rest of its body, with crooked, jagged teeth jutting from its snout, the left eye gushing black blood, the right glaring at me with red-hot hatred. Another hot spray of piss coated my pants. I screamed again, raised my pistol and began firing as it charged.
         When units 752 and 091 found me, they said I was sitting slouched in a corner, staring wide-eyed down the hall, my pistol raised and pulling the trigger, making that horrible click-click sound no officer wants to hear during a firefight. They had seen nothing. No blood. No bodies. Certainly no pig-creatures. The story went out in the media the next day that fifty students of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock had simply disappeared during the night, along with one police officer.
         Myself, I was lucky enough to wind up in a mental home for five years. They managed to calm me down to the point that I wasn't seeing that horrible creature or those bodies or what was left of Durant at every turn, but they never could stop the nightmares. I don't sleep anymore, not willingly at least, but the human body can only go so long without that basic necessity. And in my sleep, I'm surrounded by pig-creatures carving me up like a hunk of meat at the butcher store. My heart is gone, and instead of screams I'm spewing black sand. I try not to sleep. Instead I occupy myself with other pursuits. But again, those only last so long. Maybe, just maybe, now that I've put my story out there, they'll stop. Not that anyone will believe me of course, what sane person would? But it's out there none the less. They are out there, none the less.